


Trials Before the Dead

by birdzilla



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Rituals, Angst, Gen, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-16
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-17 23:57:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 18,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9352274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdzilla/pseuds/birdzilla
Summary: When the paladins land on an alien planet looking for refuge, they're instead brought to trial by the natives for the deaths of innocent Galra prisoners. Shiro attempts to take on the burden of guilt for the rest of the paladins and ends up on a spiritual journey through his paladins' trials-by-ordeal, depending on the strength of their bond to carry him through.





	1. unwanted revelation

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of the first Voltron fics I ever started, but I probably never would have finished it if the Season 2 deadline wasn't looming up, threatening to Joss my vague hand-wavey "some time in the near future, after they reunite" setting of this on the Voltron timeline.
> 
> The story was originally inspired by [alizara](alizara.tumblr.com) on Tumblr, who pointed out that there had to be more prisoners on the Galra ships that Voltron destroyed, and that Shiro had to know. Alizara kindly allowed me to take that thought as a fic prompt, and while the main thrust of the story drifted away from my original concept as I wrote, I'm still very grateful for the seed of this story and the permission to use it.

All the paladins had been looking for, after their most recent battle, was a good place to hole up and lick their wounds.

"Okay," Shiro said, scanning through the compiled damage reports on one of his side screens, then glancing back to Coran's face in the main viewport. "It looks like our best chance is to find someplace to sit tight until the Castle is flight-worthy again, and wait to bring the lions back once you won't be sitting ducks for any Galra on our tails. Do you have anyplace we can hide out?"

"Indeed I do!" Coran said. His face vanished, replaced by a local star map. "Your lions aren't far from the Bachara system. The Bacheans were a very primitive people ten thousand years ago, even less advanced than the Erusians, but the Galra data we've decoded suggests that they've come quite far since then. And that they might be sympathetic to our cause! It seems they've never risen up violently against the Galra, but they're known for frequent acts of passive resistance."

"So they probably won't give us up to the Galra if we land there," Shiro said.

"We can hope not!" Coran said. "And perhaps if you met with some of their local leaders, we could turn them into allies. At the least, we may get some information from them. Go on, be goodwill ambassadors, and we'll let you know as soon as we're off the ground."

***

Their first encounter with the Bacheans was promising. There was a Galra presence in the Bachara system, a fort on the eighth planet, but it was on the far side of their sun from their entrypoint into the system and the patrols were easy enough to evade. The fourth planet, apparently the Bachean homeworld, was also on the far side of the sun right now, but two of the three Bachean colony worlds were directly on their approach vector at this point in their orbit.

Shiro waited until they were nearly upon the third planet of the Bachara system to hail them, avoiding Galra frequencies and going straight for the planetary infrastructure. After getting shuffled through two layers of confused customs officials, Shiro was abruptly bumped up to some kind of either governmental or spiritual figure, a woman (he knew from the outward curve of her horns, thanks to Coran's thirty-second cultural primer) who introduced herself as 'the Judge of Souls.'

"We don't want to put your people in danger," Shiro told her. "But the Galra haven't detected us yet, and we need a place to hide for a day or two. I don't know if this is your jurisdiction, but if not, can you help us get in touch with someone who can make that decision?"

"Paladins of Voltron," the Judge said thoughtfully. She had a remarkably cow-like face, an impression only strengthened by the horns, and incredibly huge and liquid eyes of a deep, watery indigo. They stood out against her pinkish-grey pelt and seemed to dominate the entire viewscreen. "We know of what you have done since Voltron was awakened. Yes, the paladins of Voltron fall under my jurisdiction. And I have the right to allow you on our planet, so long as you come directly to my court."

"Thank you," Shiro said, his shoulders loosening. "Where should we land?"

***

Shiro still wasn't entirely sure what a Judge of Souls did, but it seemed to be as much of an administrative position as a spiritual one, judging from the complex of halls, offices, and monuments that she had them set the lions down in. As Shiro emerged from the Black Lion, he caught the scent of spring in the air, and relaxed even further. They were in a courtyard between buildings, and the verdant greenery surrounding the circle of tile at the center gave it a park-like air.

A small contingent of Bacheans awaited them, looking even more bovine in person with their hooved feet and switching tails. At their fore was the Judge, who beckoned them towards her. The other paladins clustered around Shiro as they walked forward, towards the center of the tile circle. At the middle Shiro paused, the hair on his neck rising. None of the Bacheans had moved, and that pattern in the tile-

He started to turn, raising a hand and opening his mouth to open the paladins to scatter, but it was too late. A domed forcefield had already sprung into existence around them.

"What the hell?" Lance demanded, outraged.

Keith looked just as mad. "We came here in peace!"

"I'm sorry," the Judge said, stepping forward, and Shiro was startled to see that she really did look upset. Her fingers twitched at her silvery robes, and her voice was unsteady. "I do not like to deceive. But it was clear that you had come to us either unaware or unremorseful of your crimes. I am the Judge of Souls, and was my duty to bring you to judgement."

"Crimes?" Hunk asked. "What crimes? We've been fighting the Galra. I thought you guys hated them too."

"Hate the Galra? Hate is a strong word, paladin. And yet, we do." The Judge bowed her head for a second, then raised it again, fixing them with her sad, liquid eyes. "The prayer of every Judge of Souls is that someday we may bring them all to account as well. But I cannot ignore your wrongs when you are in my reach, just because others are beyond it."

"You still haven't said what these wrongs are," Pidge said.

The Judge blinked at them. "You said it yourself. You have been fighting the Galra. You destroy their ships. I am not judging you for killing the Galra, for they are your enemies, and the enemies of the galaxy. But the greatest crime of the Galra, aside from the death they bring, is that they take people such as the Bacheans, and imprison them upon their ships. And those prisoners die too, when you fight the Galra."

Shiro had opened his mouth to say something, to question her logic or argue their innocence, but at her last sentence, his words died in his throat.

"Are you serious? How many ships had prisoners on them?" Lance's eyes were wide, his skin ashen. "How many of them did we-" He stopped and swallowed.

"Most of them," the Judge said, quiet and calm and sad. "The Galra stock them like they do any other supplies they might need, on each ship. For peoples such as us, who would not kill innocents, they serve as hostages against violent action. Did you not know?"

"We didn't know," Hunk said, looking at the Bacheans with wide, pleading eyes, like he was hoping for a lie. "If we knew-"

"It didn't occur to any of us," Keith interrupted, his face flat and his voice harsh and his eyes burning with self-castigating fury.

As much as he fought it, Shiro found his gaze drawn to Pidge. She stood stock-still, staring at the Bacheans with her mouth drawn tight. Shiro's gut twisted. He knew she had to be thinking of Matt and her father, who could always be on any one of those Galra ships. He set his jaw and closed his eyes, breathing deeply in and out.

"We didn't know," Lance said, and Shiro knew he was waving his arms, trying to articulate with motion all the feelings that he couldn't get out in words. "I swear, we didn't mean to, we didn't know."

Shiro took a deep breath in, feeling his lungs push against his cramping chest as they filled with air, and then held it for a long moment before letting it out. A thousand Galran ships exploded in the darkness behind his eyes, every battle they'd fought tangling together in his memory into a brilliant cacophony of death.

Shiro had known. He had spent over a year being passed from one Galra ship to another, transported here and there for the arena games. There had always been other prisoners on whatever ship carried him. How could he not have known?

And how could he have told his team?

They'd had no choice but to destroy those ships. Sparing any ships they had faced would have meant risking the lions, the castle, Voltron, _the paladins_. Shiro had thought about it before, of course. Of finding techniques to disable, instead of destroy. But everything he'd thought of had required more time, more skill, and more finesse than they had. Every extra second spent lining up crippling shots would have kept them in the line of fire of other ships. Every careful maneuver might have exposed their backs to the enemy. And sometimes they would still have to strike to kill. As Voltron, with all their private vulnerabilities, they couldn't have added one more. Any hesitation from any one of them, any doubt filtering into their bond, might have broken the lions apart when forming Voltron was most crucial.

So Shiro had kept the knowledge a secret. He'd locked it away, used all of his training and self-discipline to clamp down his awareness of what they were doing, and the way that awareness made him ache with regret and burn with self-loathing. He'd kept his teammates from ever knowing, even in the Voltron bond, what innocent lives they had snuffed out along with the Galra. Shiro had been determined that those lives would only ever be his weight to carry, not theirs.

"Whether or not you knew what you were doing makes no difference to the dead," the Bachean Judge said, and Shiro's eyes snapped open. "We know that your intentions were good, but the intention has no weight against the effects of an act. It is our dead who will judge you, and decide for themselves whether their deaths were justified. You are each of you subject to your own trial before the dead."

Shiro stepped forward, alarmed. "Wait," he said, finally summoning the strength to speak. He was surprised that his voice didn't crack. "You can't put them through your trial. It isn't right. They truly didn't know."

The Judge turned to look at Shiro, her huge, placid grey eyes even more cow-like and limpid than the last time he'd met them. " _They_ did not know, paladin of the Black Lion?"

"That's right." Shiro swallowed, twitched his shoulders back, and looked her steadily in the eye. He didn't dare look anywhere else--not at his team, not at Pidge. "I knew. And I made sure they didn't."

"Shiro-"

Without looking, Shiro held his hand out to the side in a slicing gesture, and Keith cut himself off.

"A deed committed in ignorance is not excused by it," the Judge said. Her immobile face and bovine eyes were hard to read, but Shiro thought he heard regret in her solemnity.

He pressed on that. "Everything that they did, they did under my leadership," he told her. "I am the paladin of the the Black Lion, and I directed them to form Voltron. They're my team, and the responsibility is mine."

The Judge hesitated, and even as expressionless as she was, Shiro could see that she was torn. She swayed from one round hoof to the other, her tripod-shaped hands opening and closing, and her wide gaze turned away from him to scan the crowd behind her. There were murmurs that Shiro couldn't hear. She stepped away from the paladins, and several other Bacheans came out of the crowd to speak to her in hushed whispers.

"Shiro," Hunk said. "You can't take on all the blame like that. It wasn't your fault! You were just being a good leader! It's not your fault that none of us thought of it."

Pidge's voice was sharp and biting. "Anyone who bothered to think about it would have realized. We had the information. It was a logical conclusion."

Shiro's heart seized in his chest. He kept his gaze fixed rigidly on the Judge. No power in the universe could have made him turn back around and look Pidge in the face right now.

Before his refusal to respond could fill the air too obviously, the Judge dismissed her impromptu conference and turned to meet his eyes again.

"It is not our custom to excuse a subordinate for obedience when the action is wrong," she said, "but you are not our people, and you argue as if it is the custom among yours. Each of your people _must_ suffer the trial before the dead. But it has customarily been permissible, in some cases in our history, for another to take on the actual endurance of the trial when the offender is incapable. I deem this to be another such case. In respect for your people's mores, I will permit you to take on the trials of your subordinates as well as your own, if you will endure such."

"I will," Shiro said instantly, barely beating out Keith's furious cry of denial and Lance's echoing protest. Hunk began to plead, and Shiro put his hand up again, which had less effect on Hunk than it had on Keith. He turned his head slightly, enough to angle his chin towards them, not enough for him to have to see anyone's face. "Team, this is my responsibility."

"Shiro," Pidge began, and he flinched away, turning about to face the Judge again.

At some unseen gesture from the Judge, a small gap appeared in the forcefield directly before Shiro. He dropped his arm and stepped through before Pidge could say anything more. There was a quiet hiss as it closed behind him, and a chorus of protests. But the forcefield muffled them, and Shiro did his best not to listen as the Judge led him swiftly away.

***

The trial before the dead began in a round, domed hall. The building had looked like it was cut from crystal from the outside, its smooth glassy surface gleaming in a thousand iridescent colors and broken only by the small hump of a door. Within, it was like a mirror. Everywhere Shiro looked, ahead or behind or above, his own face looked back at him.

"From here you will prepare your mind and journey to commune with the dead," the Judge told him. She was holding a bowl that seemed to be carved in one flawless piece from the same kind of iridescent crystal; Shiro wasn't surprised to see that the inner lip was also mirrored. "This is a liquor that our people customarily drink in our preparations. It will help your eyes open to the path before you."

She held out the bowl. Shiro took it and began to raise it to his lips, but she waved a hand to stop him.

"The dead cannot sit in judgement as the living do," she told him. "Instead, the path itself is the trial. From the moment you step upon it, you will be before the dead, in both the legal and the spiritual sense. They will test you through ordeal, which is the oldest, truest form of justice. If you successfully pass through the ordeal, it will prove that your cause was just, and therefore their deaths were also just, in service of that cause. If you fail the ordeal, it will prove you at fault. And, paladin, it will also kill you."

Shiro nodded. He knew that the warning was meant to frighten him, but he wasn't afraid, only determined. The others had been innocent, and it was his duty to prove it. If that meant that the guilt fell entirely upon his shoulders, he would have to face that danger as it came.

The Judge's eyes were very large and very wet, though she hadn't blinked once that he'd seen, and they were so singular in their grip upon him that he almost felt like he was falling into her stare. "Be mindful, paladin. You face not only your own trial, but those of your comrades as well. You will face theirs first, one by one, before the path finally leads you to your own. And should you fail in any one of those ordeals, both you and the one truly being judged by the trial will die for it, and those remaining will have to face their own trials on their own recognizance."

That was a more alarming warning. Shiro stood to attention and squared his shoulders under the extra weight of her words. "My paladins are good people. If it's their innocence on trial, justice is on my side."

"I hope so," the Judge said, and inclined her huge head to him, a motion that seemed like it should unbalance her but instead was performed with clean, elegant grace. "I leave you now, paladin. Drink, and be tried by the dead."

She swept out with a rustle of fabric and a loud chiming of hooves. Shiro looked down at the bowl in his hands, filled with a clear, fragrant liquid that did nothing to impede the mirroring effect of the bowl's interior. After a moment's consideration, he took a seat on the floor. If the liquor knocked him out or sent him on a drug trip, which it seemed from the Judge's description that it might, he didn't want to fall over and crack his head on the smooth, milky surface.

As he lifted the bowl to his lips, he paused, studying the liquid one last time. It smelled pleasant, a bit like lavender might if lavender was a closer relative to onions, but he had no idea what effect it would have on a human body.

He didn't have a choice, though. The only door was the one that the Judge had left through; he guessed that following her out would look like blasphemy to the Bacheans. He didn't see another path out, or any way but drinking this to reveal it. And the other paladins were waiting on him to pass this trial.

Their faces in his mind, Shiro tilted the bowl and drank.

The time between raising the bowl and this moment seemed to elide away; Shiro couldn't remember any transition, or even how the liquor had tasted in his mouth. But the bowl was empty on the floor before him, and now, instead of the flat floor and the blank, mirrored wall, he could see a spiral path rising up in front of him. The walls around him had gone dark, though he could still see his reflection, if he looked close enough, pierced by the tiny pinpoints of light that glittered in every direction.

The spiral path glowed too, a ramp of light rising up out of the milkiness of the floor with no supports and no edges, rising what seemed infinitely high overhead. Shiro stood and took his first step upon it.


	2. clarity of conviction

"Come on, seriously? Let us out!"

Lance was still going, arguing with the few Bacheans who had stuck around to watch them stew inside their impromptu forcefield prison. Hunk had given up on pleading a good hour ago, if Keith was tracking time right, after it became clear that his big watery eyes had nothing on these Bacheans' huge cow faces. Keith had shouted, for a while, but it had had even less effect than Lance and Hunk, so he'd switched as discreetly as he could to probing the forcefield for weak spots.

Pidge hadn't said or done anything at all for that whole hour. She'd just sat on the ground, staring off in the direction they'd taken Shiro, with that pinched little frown that meant that she was thinking hard. And probably mad at someone, while she was at it.

"Look, if we're willing to take on these trial things, shouldn't you let us do it?" Lance said. There was strain in his voice, and Keith wasn't sure if it was from emotion or just from how long he'd been raising it. "You said yourself that's not how your customs work. He can't take on responsibility for all of us. We're paladins! He's not our dad or anything."

There was movement in the direction Pidge was staring, and Keith spun around to look that way. The Bachean who had taken Shiro away, the self-declared Judge of Souls, was coming towards them. Walking up to the forcefield, she tucked her hands into the folds of her shiny silver robe and gave them all a big-eyed, unreadable look.

"Do you wish to assume responsibility for your own deeds?" she asked them.

"Yes," Keith said immediately.

"Your trials have already begun," she told them, crushing the moment of hope. "I have seen the path open before the paladin of the Black Lion. But if you are willing to accept the debts placed upon you, you may help him as he goes before the dead."

"What can we do?" Hunk asked.

The Judge pulled her hands from her robes and clasped them together, bowing a little over her folded fingers. "You must meditate upon the trials as they occur, and project your will and the desire to assume the weight of your deeds unto the companion who is enduring your trials for you. Paladin of the Red Lion," she said, looking directly at Keith, "the trials begin with yours."

***

Shiro wasn't sure how long he spent climbing the ramp, spiraling ever upward in the light-pricked dark. But finally he took another step and came down, heavily, as the ramp vanished before and in front of him.

He was standing on a dark metal grate, loud beneath his feet; when he looked down there was only darkness below the metal floor, and darkness at the edges of the space all around. But the area he was in was lit by a circle tall dark-metal sconces, a blue-white flame at the top of each one flickering and bright. It felt very like an arena, and Shiro felt a shiver of apprehension.

That feeling only increased when a small, slender figure stepped out into the far side of the circle, facing him. It was encased in armor of the same dark metal, hiding its features, but its shape seemed closer to that of a human than that of the Bacheans. The features forged into the armor, though, were cat-like, and it did have a feline grace.

It drew two swords from what seemed like empty air and tossed one across the arena to clatter at Shiro's feet. "Pick up your blade, red paladin," it said, in a voice that seemed to come not from the figure itself, but as an echo whispering out of the darkness around and below and above them.

So this was Keith's test. Shiro bend down and picked up the blade, holding it gingerly as its weight shifted in its hand. When drawn and tossed, it had been a long and slender rapier, as elegant as the creature that had pulled it forth from the air. As soon as he touched it, though, it changed to something broader, double-bladed, heavier and not as long--not quite like Keith's bayard, but very close, though still the solid dark black metal of this place.

This wasn't going to be impossible, at least. Keith had been trying to teach Shiro how to fight with a sword, and he'd redoubled his efforts after his encounter with Zarkon and the sight of the black bayard. Shiro didn't have anything resembling Keith's skill, but he could beat a level one gladiator android, so he wasn't completely at sea with this fight. And, he thought grimly, he had plenty of motivation.

His optimism lasted until his opponent raised one hand, its gauntlet shaped like an elongated paw, and twitched one metal-clawed finger. Then at least a dozen more shapes just like it came into view--no puff of smoke, no displacement of air, not even a shimmer, just places where the armored warriors had not been and now were.

"All of us can make you bleed, red paladin," the being said, with the same echoed effect. "But you can only draw blood from one of us. This battle will be won with the first blood you draw, or when you give us your last."

And then, without further warning, the mass of warriors leapt forward on the attack.

Shiro's first thought had been to focus on the original, which seemed likely to be the one that he could hurt, but he didn't have the time. These beings, or these echoes of the being, or whatever they might be were very cat-like, and very fast, darting and leaping and making themselves nearly impossible to track.

Even with his armor on, Shiro felt two pricks through its vulnerable joints within the first few seconds, and heard a dozen more tiny _tinks_ as their light blades struck the metal. He raised his left arm to generate his shield, and began to fend them off with it and by parrying with his sword, but he couldn't maneuver nearly fast enough to keep most of them off. He had to duck blows to the face, dodge sideways as they aimed for his armpits, and staggered when one pierced the joint behind his knee.

Fending them off wasn't doing much. He had to go on the offense, or he'd be brought down in no time. Spinning about, Shiro blocked a blow aimed at his neck and then slashed out with his sword, sweeping it into one of the warriors with such force that it was knocked back. When it hit the floor, it vanished, and Shiro felt his optimism rebound; it might not be the one that bled, but at least it could be vanquished.

It took several more such strikes before Shiro realized that he couldn't winnow them down that way. Almost as soon as one vanished, another would appear at the edge of the circle, near the flaming sconces, and charge back into the fray. They had light, darting swords, and only seemed to strike with stabbing motions at his few vulnerable points; if he intercepted them with his larger, heavier blade, he could parry them easily, even knock them away. And the warriors were small and light enough themselves that he could actually knock them over and bowl them into vanishing with his shield. But it wasn't enough. He was bleeding in five more places where the armor hadn't been adequate, and they had seen the vulnerability of his neck and were constantly stabbing towards it.

Shiro was panting, though he was doing his best to keep his breathing under control. He could feel blood running down the back of his calf, from both armpits, from a wound at his waist; one of the warriors had already nicked his neck, and more blood was pooling in his collar. For all the warriors he'd knocked over, he hadn't found the one that would bleed. Though he also hadn't gotten a successful strike through anyone's armor, so maybe he had, and he just hadn't hit it the right way. Sword upraised to parry another blow, he took a step back, half-turning to survey his opponents.

***

Keith had never been good at meditation. He could hold still if he had to, but he couldn't clear his mind out and let the world around him recede. But he tried anyway, reaching out for Shiro the way he would have if they were trying to form the Voltron bond.

There was a moment of tension, as if Shiro was resisting him, or some other force was trying to slide in between. Keith felt anger flare up inside him and didn't bother to swallow it; instead he let it drive him onward. This whole rigamarole was stupid. Keith didn't like that Shiro had kept this a secret from the rest of them, but it wasn't these people's place to judge him. Sometimes you had to take a few blows to win a fight, and Keith could accept that--even better than Shiro could, he suspected. If they wanted to put Keith on trial, they could put _Keith_ on trial, and not fuck around more with Shiro's head. He'd had enough people do that to him already.

With the red glow of his anger lighting up his thoughts, Keith could feel the connection, suddenly, Shiro far away but still present in the bond. It was as if he was in a dark place, hearing distant echoes: the clang of metal against metal, the scrape of two surfaces grinding together. With it came a rush of emotion. Distant, as if through a medicated haze, disconnected and vague and nothing like his own, but there was the throbbing warmth of concern and the tightening noose of fear and, under it all, the throat-clenching half-sob of guilt and regret.

Keith's hands clenched against his bent knees, or at least he had a feeling that would have made him clench his hands against his knees, if he'd still felt present in his own body. Keith could imagine him, struggling against some driving enemy, the worry and the weight of his guilt slowing his steps and threatening to lock him down the same way that the flashbacks did when he remembered something painful.

He'd only done what he'd had to do. Keith threw that knowledge, his _certainty_ of it back through the bond, driving it through the fog between them with sheer force of will. There was no point wasting time with second thoughts and second guesses. They had plenty of time to talk this out later; Shiro had to stand by his choices now, and have confidence in them, if he was going to survive. And Keith needed him to survive.

***

Shiro still couldn't see an opening, and he was starting to feel frantic. This was Keith's trial. He would have been fine; he was smaller, faster, and infinitely more skilled with the sword, and he probably would have known right away which opponent to strike and how to do it. In comparison to him, Shiro was oversized, clumsy, and unable to even use his sword as anything but a blunt club. What would Keith say, watching him like this?

_"Shiro, you're overthinking it."_

He could almost hear Keith, tired and exasperated, near the end of one of their lessons.

_"Shiro, you're trying to think tactically. You can't think in a swordfight. There isn't time. Your body already has to know what to do. You've done this enough that you know what I'm doing when I strike like this, and your muscles know how to react, but you're letting your head get in the way."_

He could remember the lecture as if Keith was right there, growling it into his ear. But Shiro _was_ the tactician of the group; it was how he had to fight his battles, with everyone's strengths and weaknesses in mind. Keith was the one who acted on instinct, who combined knowing the right action and taking the right action into one smooth singular movement. Sometimes the call he made turned out to be the wrong one, but he didn't hesitate in fear of that; he made his choice and he committed to it, and didn't worry about the aftermath.

This was Keith's trial. Maybe that was what Shiro had to do.

An easier thought to have than to put into action, though. Shiro desperately batted away a few more warriors, trying to think through his options. Would the one vulnerable warrior be on the outside of the group? Would it act any differently than the others? Did he need to go for the joints himself, slice more, stab more, to see if he could draw blood?

_"Shiro. It's just like fighting with your hand. You have perfect flow there. Imagine your sword is an extension of your hand, and stop_ thinking _about it. Let your body do what it knows how to do. Just strike."_

It really was as if he could hear Keith, standing right there. 

And there was a blade whistling right past his throat--Shiro was out of time and out of choices. Stomach churning, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let his body move without him. He could hear the clanging of the warriors' feet on the metal floor, the whisper of their movement, but he didn't try to draw any meaning from it. He just raised his blade, knocked an opponent aside, and lunged forward, driving his blade across and down- 

-meeting resistance, and cutting on through it- 

-and feeling the weight under his blade give way and fall. 

Shiro opened his eyes, expecting at any second to see whichever warrior he'd struck hit the floor and vanish, his shoulders hunched against the bite of small blades into the backs of his shoulders and knees. But the space had gone silent, the presences behind him vanished. And the warrior in front of him was kneeling on the floor, its armor split from shoulder to spine where Shiro had struck, black blood welling up and pouring down it. 

"You have passed your trial, red paladin," the creature said, and reached up towards Shiro--no, towards Shiro's sword. Its gauntleted hand closed around the blade, and then it, and the sword, and the sconces, and the grated metal flooring all vanished. 

Pinpricks of light shone in the darkness all around Shiro, and the glowing spiral ramp was back under his feet, rising up into infinity. Shiro took a deep breath and shuddered. All the blood he'd felt on his skin, all the sharp little wounds he'd taken in the fight, had vanished, leaving him as whole as if it had never happened. That was more unnerving than the fight itself had been. 

Shiro took another deep breath and started walking up the ramp again. He still had a long way to go. 


	3. bearing up

Keith had been sitting cross-legged on the ground for what seemed like ages, hands on his knees, eyes closed. He went pale, at one point, and his brow furrowed with what looked like effort, but beside that he didn't move or speak. Hunk walked in circles around him and worried at the seams of his clothing, for lack of anything else to do.

Finally Keith breathed out an explosive sigh, pulling Hunk out of his fretting, and opened his eyes. He started to his feet, and Hunk reached out and pulled him the rest of the way up in his impatience. Keith jerked away, startled, and then Hunk saw his gaze focus.

"He passed," Keith said. "I don't know how I know, but he passed my trial."

"Who's next?" Lance demanded, pushing in next to Hunk. "Is it my turn?"

"No." The Judge shook her head, and Hunk felt his stomach twist into a knot when her limpid eyes fixed on him. "Paladin of the Yellow Lion, your trial is next."

***

This time, Shiro wasn't surprised when the ramp, after an unknowable amount of time, once again vanished. This time he was on rocky, uneven ground, dusty and pale grey beneath his feet. He looked around and saw the rocky landscape stretching out to him for yards on every side, but beyond that it vanished into a rolling grey fog that obscured the sky overhead.

No, not fog, Shiro realized, as the drifting smoke scratched at the back of his throat. It didn't have the strong reek of a nearby fire, but rather a thin, attenuated scent, with a trace of sulphur, and when he shifted his weight, he realized that the dust under his feet was actually ash. He looked again towards the horizon, looking for some kind of distant glow. But of course, this place wasn't real, and there probably was no volcano.

The ground shuddered under his feet. A moment later Shiro caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned to see a massive figure shambling out of the fog. His first thought was that the shaking ground was caused by its thudding feet, but then the tremor came again, and the huge creature trembled with it, struggling to keep its balance. As it emerged entirely from the fog, Shiro saw that it was huge and broad-shouldered, with dangling arms and broad feet, every part of it seeming to be made out of piled-together rock.

It wore no clothing, but the rock was featureless. The huge boulder of its head might have had a face once upon a time, or the semblance of one, but the place where a face would have been had been ground away by some kind of force. It shambled up to Shiro and stopped, arms sagging to its sides; there was a deep, rumbling groan that seemed to come from the ground all around them.

"Stand up straight our burdens, yellow paladin," the golem said, in a deep voice that sounded like the rocks all around them grating together.

Shiro opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but before he could voice the question, a chunk of the golem's cobbled-together stone chest broke off and simply fell away. He reached out without thinking, snatching the stone from the air, but when he tried to press it back into place, the golem stepped backward away from him.

"You have accepted the weight, yellow paladin, and you must bear it to the end of the pass," the golem said, in that earth-rending voice. "There is safe harbor beyond for our hearts, if you can bring us there without abandoning us on the way or being crushed beneath the burden."

Then it sank down, toppling in slow motion. Whatever force held the rocks of its legs together gave way, crumpling it into a parody of a kneeling position, and next its arms fell away from its shoulders; last its torso was sundered, leaving the faceless, ruined head atop a pile of lifeless stones. The ground shuddered again, and a few of the stones on the edges rolled away.

Shiro looked down at the stone cradled in the crook of his arm, his own heart hammering. Then he looked up and around. He stood on a slope, and the golem had spoken of a pass, as was used to cross a mountain; now that he looked more closely, he could see the traces of a trail, or at least a corridor in which the larger boulders had been cleared away, leading upward. Hugging the stone heart close, Shiro started that way.

The fog of smoke was thinner ahead of him, and continued to be thinner that direction as he walked, confirming his decision. To the left and right it was only feet away now, and when he looked behind him, it was almost to his back, hiding the perished golem from sight. The trail was rough, though; it had been cleared of boulders, but not of smaller rocks, and the ground itself was ragged and broken.

Another tremor rocked the earth, and Shiro nearly stumbled, scraping his left hand against the hard ground as he caught himself. He clutched the stone heart closer, afraid that dropping it might count as a failure of the ordeal.

When he straightened up again, there was another golem, standing just off the trail and wreathed in smoke. It raised its blunt stone hands to its chest, then pulled them away with another stone clamped between them. The golem held it out to Shiro in silence. Its face, too, was ground away, with one huge chip to one side as if the instrument had slipped in the grinding.

Shiro reached out and took the stone, tucking it into the crook of his arm with the other one. The golem dropped its arms to its sides, and then it, too, began to collapse in slow motion, the stones of its body falling away until it was nothing but a rock pile. Shiro found himself glancing down at its heart again, pressing a protective hand to it as he walked onward.

The first stone heart had been, well, a stone--it was about the size of a basketball, and was just as heavy as a stone of that heft could be expected to weigh, but Shiro had gripped it with his metal arm and not particularly minded the weight. Two of them, though, began to pull on his shoulder, and Shiro considered spreading out the weight. But it was easier to move quickly with his left hand free to steady himself when the next tremor shook the ground beneath his feet.

Resigning himself to the weight, Shiro forged on, moving slowly up the increasingly steep slope and steadying himself occasionally with his free hand. The sulphur edge to the smoke grew stronger as he rose upward. He wasn't particularly surprised when a third faceless golem stepped out of the smoke and freed its heart from its chest. Another followed after it, and another. Shiro took their hearts, one by one, and watched them crumble away.

As the number of stones he had to carry grew, Shiro struggled to balance them. He had a pile now, and needed both arms to cradle it; on the sheer slope he was trying to scale, if he dropped any one of them by accident, it would roll off into the smoke and been lost. His back and shoulders ached with the weight of the stones, but he set his jaw and continued on, stepping more slowly and carefully to stay steady as the tremors rumbled underfoot.

The next golems didn't expect him to have a hand free to take their hearts, merely piled them on top until Shiro had to rest his chin atop the load. He shuffled forward, seeking his next step with the toe of his foot and only planting it once he was sure he had found firm ground. The tremors had become near-constant now, and he thought they might be growing stronger.

Then the next step didn't bear him upward, as he'd expected; Shiro nearly toppled forward in surprise at the unexpected flatness of the ground in front of him. He brought both feet onto the flat and made a shuffling turn to look sideways at the trail ahead of him, and saw that it dropped away before him, the downward slope of the pass as steep and rocky as the upward slope had been. There were also four more golems up here at the crest, thumping towards him, prying their hearts out of their chests.

Shiro staggered under the weight as it was added, and he swore he could feel his spine creak as he struggled to keep it straight. He thought of the downward slope and his own heart sank. With the veil of smoke over the landscape, he had no idea how far he had yet to go, or what kind of ground he would encounter past the few yards he'd see. He wasn't sure how he could carry the mass of stones in his arms down that hill, or how long his aching arms and strained back and sore legs would last. But this was Hunk's trial, and he had to pass it. Shiro took a deep breath, and started downward.

The slope was unstable, and Shiro nearly fell eight different times in his first ten steps. He felt his back wrench painfully on the last tumble, catching the weight of the stone hearts before they could topple from his arms, and crumbled to the ground under the weight of his burden.

***

Hunk felt sick. He was doing his best to focus on his trial anyway--he had a lot of practice fighting past the urge to puke. But even as the rest of the world fell away, he was left with the nauseous twist of his gut. And it only cramped tighter as he tried to do as the Judge of Souls had said, and accept the weight of what they'd done. It was a crushing burden, all the heavier for how unexpected it had been, and it made acid burn all the way up his throat.

The harder he focused, the heavier and more real that weight felt: straining his shoulders, cramping his arms, sending sharp jabs of pain down his back. And with it came a whiff of smoke or dust, just enough to coat his throat, there and gone again the next time he breathed. It made his eyes water.

Or maybe that was the wave of desperation he felt, a feeling that should have choked his throat and made his eyes water and instead lodged in his chest and made him feel like his breath was coming harsh. It wasn't, as far as Hunk could tell when the cramp in his stomach was the only part of him that still felt real. But that was something Shiro did, his breath going ragged when he was in desperate straits. And as soon as he thought that Hunk could feel the bitter acid that for Shiro meant self-castigation instead of anxiety, and the mantle of responsibility that only further weighed him down.

It was no surprise that Shiro hadn't said anything to them. It was something that hurt to know, that left Hunk shaky and uncertain and sick to his stomach, and Shiro was practical enough--and cared about them enough--not to want to throw that on him. Hunk didn't think he could have kept it together, if he'd learned this before he'd met Shay and realized the importance of fighting the Galra. He was barely keeping it together now. They'd hurt people they hadn't meant to hurt, and not knowing they were doing it had only made it worse; it had been clumsiness, instead of a thoughtful decision. They hadn't even had a chance to consider other options.

But it wasn't like they could take it back, could they? It was part of their burden now, just like all the Galra soldiers they had known they were killing. They could feel bad about it, grieve for the prisoners and apologize to their families and try to figure out how to help them going forward, but they couldn't fix anything if they let the grief hold them back. Hunk had a lot of experience fighting through negativity, too. And right now that was what Shiro needed. He tried his hardest to project that back through their bond, through the wave of desperation: it was okay to feel overwhelmed, but he had to keep going.

***

Cradling the shifting pile of stones in his lap with both hands to keep them from tumbling from his lap, Shiro tried to breathe through their weight. He kept thinking about Hunk. This trial wouldn't have been easier for him, exactly, but Shiro could see how he was more suited for it, or perhaps how the trial had been shaped for him, his greater strength and his broader build and his lower center of gravity. He would have struggled in different ways, but he wouldn't have hesitated to do it.

_"We're taking on a lot. It's scary, thinking about just the five of us responsible for the fate of the whole galaxy."_

Shiro remembered a conversation with Hunk, late at night when they were the only two people in the kitchen, shortly after they'd liberated the Balmorans.

_"It's a lot for us to carry, and you know I thought we couldn't do it. I'm still not sure we can do it. I mean, it's just us! But I've seen what it's like out there now, and... there's no one else, is there? No one else is going to help the Balmorans, or anyone else out there that the Galra have oppressed. We have to do as much as we can for them. And if we don't make it, at least someone tried to help."_

Hunk's voice had been shaky, and Shiro had seen the doubts in his eyes. But he'd ended firmly, planting a solid fist on the table between them, and he'd looked at Shiro with resolve. Everyone knew when Hunk was scared, because he didn't try to hide it. But they trusted him anyway, because scared or not he would be there, the sturdy base that Voltron was built upon. Hunk was afraid, but he wouldn't let that stop him from acting with compassion.

_"Someone has to help them, and we're the only ones."_

Another tremor rocked the pass, and the stones atop of Shiro shuddered, but stayed securely in his lap. He hugged them a little tighter, considering the situation. He wasn't sure he could keep them all steady if he tried to stand up here, and he was afraid he couldn't keep holding them all if he did make it too his feet. The slope was steep to the point of sheerness, and the tremors were coming even faster now, closer together. Instead of trying to stand under his burden, he started scooting down the hill, the stone hearts cradled in his lap, sliding carefully down the slope until the ground leveled out enough for him to try and stand again.

He gathered the stones together in his arms and tilted his chin over them to support the stack; his back tried to seize when he rose, but Shiro forced himself upright, leaning slightly back, taking a low rolling stance to keep his balance as more tremors shuddered the ground beneath him. His arms were numb, and he kept flexing his fingers, terrified that the stone hearts would slip out of his failing grip. The smoke swirled all around, obscuring everything, so that all he could see was the burden in his arms. He shuffled forward, one step, then another.

Just as he thought that the next tremor would make him fall, his next step touched something soft, that rustled. Shiro froze, then took the step, and the smoke around him vanished in a blaze of warm yellow light. Huge stone hands reached out to take the topmost stone heart from his pile, and then the next, and the next, until his arms were empty and a line of golems stood before him. They seemed to be made of new stone, rough and dirt-covered as if they were freshly hewn from the ground, and the stones of their heads hadn't been carved into faces yet. Only their hearts, placed back within their chests, were old and grey.

"You have passed your trial, yellow paladin." One by one, they bowed to him, and then vanished, the yellow light washing over them.

It blinked out, and Shiro was once again on the spiral path, his back whole and his aches and numbness wiped away. He rubbed the small of his back anyway, out of reflex, and then started back up the curve of the path ahead of him.


	4. he who dares

Hunk's hands were clenched so tightly in his lap that his knuckles were white and the bones of his fingers pressed against his skin, but finally they relaxed. He slumped sideways, gave a little snort, and then stood up and brushed himself off. Lance held his breath.

"Shiro's okay," Hunk said, his eyes shining with wonder. "He passed my trial, guys. He's okay."

Lance let his breath out in a whoosh, then opened his mouth. The Judge forestalled him.

"Yes, Paladin of the Blue Lion, it is time for your trial."

"Okay," Lance said, dropping down into the same cross-legged position that she had instructed the other two to assume and holding his hands out to his sides, making circles of his fingers like a TV guru. "I've got this."

As he closed his eyes and started to breathe in time with the priest's instructions, he hoped that he was right.

***

There was still no way to measure time on the spiral path. Shiro tried counting the seconds, just as an exercise, but the numbers seemed to wisp away as he thought them, and when he opened his mouth to count aloud, no sound came from his throat. That was so unnerving that he didn't try again.

Still, unmeasured or not, the time until the path vanished underfoot seemed to stretch out even longer than before. When it did happen, Shiro took two more steps before he stopped, hearing this ground crunch under his feet. He looked down to see dark, colorless, packed-down sand. It was damp enough to hold his footprints, and from behind he could hear the roar of the surf. But when he looked back, all he could see was the star-flecked darkness that had lain outside the spiral path, surging forward and back against the sand and sending up little sprays of light like foam as each wave crashed.

Close by on either side, the light-edged surf beat against sheer walls of dark grey stone, an unassailable cliff rising up to hold off the sea. Shiro could see the striated water marks on it where the high tide most often struck. He stood in the only break between the cliffs, and ahead of him a great pile of lead-colored rock had tumbled from either side, creating outcroppings and glowing tidepools along sandy inlet. The sky above was as dark and sparkling as the sea, but the bright spray and the scattered pools kept the landscape washed with constantly-shifting light.

"Keep your footing as the ground slips away, blue paladin," a soft voice said, like a voice whispering out of the waves.

Shiro turned about, tense and at the ready, to see a lithe, long-limbed figure standing just behind him in the lapping surf. He jumped backwards, his heart in his throat. The figure was vaguely human-shaped, but the glistening silver scales and long, clawed fingers belied that, as did the long tendrils on its scalp that could have been either locks of wet hair or falls of seaweed and in either case covered its face entirely. The being wore nothing in the way of clothes or covering, but scales and frilled fins hid any intimate details.

"The tide is rising," the ocean-voice spoke from amid the waves. "You must find your way above it, for the surf will drag you under if it can, and then you are mine to devour."

Shiro looked to the thin strip of sand between him and the waves, and saw that the voice spoke the truth. The surf was creeping up towards him, a shifting line of foaming light followed by a wave of glittering darkness. He took a step back, sand crunching underfoot, and looked again at the high-tide marks to either side. They were well above his head.

"The ground rises ahead," the being whispered in the voice of the surf, "and you may find a way upward. But be shy of the water, for even its lapping may draw you under."

Nodding to the creature, Shiro turned around to look ahead of him again, to the rockfall ahead of him. He couldn't see to the end of them, and tell whether open ground or another cliff lay beyond, but the top of the pile was well above the tide-mark. Make it there, he thought, and he would survive this trial.

He made for the rocks as quickly as he could. But as soon as he started crying, he had to slow his pace, for fear of twisting an ankle or stepping into one of the tidepools. Each of them glowed like the sea-spray did, seeming to be full not of water but of light, and they provided little circles of illumination that helped Shiro to wend his way through the debris on the shadowed beach. But he remembered the sea-being's warning and kept clear of them, even as they guided his path.

The rocks shifted under his weight now and then as he climbed, pebbles tumbling noisily from their places, but for the most part the footing was stable. It wasn't the shaking ground of the last trial he had to worry about. Instead it was their haphazard piling, and the stretches of darkness between the pools. Twice his foot caught in the first hundred meters, when he stepped too readily into a shadowy patch, and once he plunged into a gap in the pile nearly to his knee and lost precious time hauling himself out again.

And that time was precious. Shiro looked back as he was pulling himself free to see the surf rising with unnatural speed, the waves already sweeping upwards and crashing against the first few rocks. Ahead of him, he could tell that the pile grew steeper, long slabs of broken stone that leaned against each other at sharp angles and provided fewer steps and handholds for his climb. Fewer tidepools, too, only a few small gleams half-hidden on the way up towards the waterline.

Shiro looked back again as he resumed climbing and saw that it was darker behind him. The rising tide had reached the tidepools and swept into them, and their glowing water had been extinguished, swept into its sparkling darkness. He felt a stirring of apprehension in his stomach.

His climb became more of a scramble as he hit the long, sheer rocks, searching for handholds and yanking himself up with his arms instead of stepping from one elevation to another. In no time at all his shoulders were aching, his fingers scraped and sore where he dug them into the stone, and the tide was still coming behind him. Every time he looked back it seemed to be rising faster, closer on his heels, the glittering spray of it dampening the rocks around him while the water swallowed up rocks he'd scaled only seconds before.

Despite the struggle of the climb, and the urgency that the rising water lent to it, Shiro was certain he was nearly past the trial. Most of the tidepools had vanished, and their light with them; the one he'd passed just below winked out, and then there was only one left above him, the last dim circle of illumination provided to him on the darkening beach. But there was enough light from it to show him the high-water line on the cliffs, just beyond it. He hauled himself up to crouch beside that last tidepool, barely escaping the surf lapping at his heels.

He glanced down at the glowing gap in the stone, and saw something moving in it. It was a small creature, with the five limbs of a starfish, but they stretched out in long tendrils around it as it darted frantically around the tidepool. It really was frantic, Shiro realized, bending down despite the urgency of the tide just behind him; it was flinging itself back and forth across the tidepool, glowing even more brightly than the lapping light surrounding it. Shiro thought of the star-flecked black sea rising up on them both, and the tidepools blinking out below him, and had to swallow down regret for the desperate little animal's fate.

Spray spattered the rock beside him, and he jerked upright and turned to face the last massive slab between himself and safety. He couldn't let himself get dragged under and drown, not during Lance's trial. Reaching up, he felt for a handhold, grabbed the indent in the edge of the rock, and pulled himself upward, gritting his teeth against the pull in his shoulders and kicking against the rock for leverage. He was almost to safety, and if he could just make it there, he'd count this as the easiest trial so far.

***

Everything felt wrong.

Not reaching out to Shiro; that was easy, it was just like dropping into the Voltron bond. Lance could feel his grim determination in the back of his head, urgency driving his actions and any fear and guilt kept under iron control. But there was a dissonant feeling under all of that, and while Lance couldn't put his finger on it, he had a feeling that it had to do with him. No matter how much he tried to focus on this trial thing, he kept thinking about what the Judge had said.

He couldn't even count all the ships they'd defeated, blown apart in blazes of clean-looking light. How many prisoners had been on them? How many of those prisoners had families waiting at home, still hoping and grieving and never knowing whether their loved ones were still alive? Lance had thought more than once, alone at night on the Castle of Lions, about how his own family might feel about his disappearance. And now he had to think about so many more people out there in the galaxy who might be holding their breath, wondering, waiting for word....

What could they tell them, if they ever got the chance? Lance wasn't sure there were words for this kind of guilt. What would he want them to tell his own family, he wondered, if he'd died like that? He'd want someone to say that he'd died heroically, of course, organizing a prison break or sabotaging an engine or something else cool, but if that hadn't happened? What would his _family_ want the paladins to say?

That they'd done their best for him. Duh. Which Lance couldn't say, and that made him kind of want to sink into the ground somewhere and never come out. He trusted Shiro to lead them, and he know Shiro probably had good reasons not to let them know, but--Shiro wasn't perfect, no matter how much they wanted to think he was, and they were supposed to be a team. After this, Lance really hoped they'd get a chance to put their heads together, just to make sure there wasn't something Shiro wasn't missing that they could have done.

After this. Lance breathed in deep and tried to push his shakiness back down the bond at Shiro, just in case the sense of connection would do some good. He didn't want to shake that sense of deep determination, he just knew that something still felt wrong, and he wanted to be sure that it wasn't something that was tripping Shiro up because Lance didn't have his mind on the job. 

***

Atop the rock he'd just scaled, Shiro took a deep breath and glanced down at the waves beating against the rock below. They were rising higher and higher, almost to the tidepool, and his heart clenched again to see the long-limbed starfish grasp at the rock above it it and try and fail to pull itself up. But however he felt about it, Shiro couldn't go back; he'd made it above the high-tide mark and passed the ordeal, and he wasn't going to turn around and doom his teammate. The tidepool wasn't the trial.

...Was it?

_"Okay, fine, it might be dangerous, but we can handle it! We have the most powerful weapon in the universe, don't we?"_

Shiro found himself remembering, of all things, an argument. It had been some minor thing, a Galra patrol that had passed nearby in pursuit of a battered little pirate ship, and Lance had wanted to jump out and help it get away. The castle had still been recovering from the corruption of the Galra crystal, though, and Shiro hadn't wanted to take the risk. Especially when Lance, whatever slant he put on it, had seemed so clearly set on an easy victory that he could crow about later.

_"There's not that many of them. We could take that bunch in the lions, easy. The castle doesn't have to get involved at all. And what if the people they're chasing are really the good guys? Refugees or freedom fighters or whatever? Come on, Shiro. We're the paladins of Voltron, we can do this!"_

When the last two trials had ended, Shiro had known right away. His breath caught, and then he shoved himself off the top of the slab he'd just scaled, sliding down it to land beside the tidepool and plunging his hand into the water.

He jerked in surprise when another hand under the water snatchs at his, long fingers wrapping around his wrist with surprising strength and claws scrabbling at the metal. The water churned wildly, hiding what was happening beneath, but he could feel the scrape of sharp, needle-like teeth, and if it had been his flesh hand and not the metal one the bite would have taken off a significant chunk of flesh.

But it was the metal one, and Shiro twisted his wrist from the grasp of clinging fingers and scooped up the tendril-armed starfish. He jerked his hand up out of the water and scrambled back up the rock again, just ahead of the surf foaming up behind him and tugging at his heels. The tidepool's light blinked out, leaving only the sea-spray's glitter in the dark, but the starfish glowed, steadily, an unblinking radiance twined up and down his right arm to illuminate the rock in front of him as he reached for it.

His feet slipping and catching on the rough rock, his left hand scraped raw by it, Shiro dragged himself up the steep slope a second time. Just shy of the top his arms threatened to give out, and he there for a few long seconds, feet kicking, feeling sea-spray dampen little spots on his pant legs, before he could pull himself back up atop the broken rock.

There was movement in the corner of his eye, and Shiro looked up, following it. He saw the scaled being standing on the rocks above, face tilted down towards him, the light of the starfish illuminating it in wild contrasts of light and shadow, and froze.

He was above the tide-line, Shiro thought, and yet the being--which had to have been what tried to snatch at him from beneath, in the tidepool, and which had promised earlier to devour him if he entered the water--was still there. His heart thudded in his chest, and he was trying to decide if he could get the jump on it, his eyes narrowing and his muscles tense, when it spoke.

"You have passed your trial, blue paladin." It bent and reached down toward him, its hand outheld, the claws bent back and away.

Shiro hesitated a moment, then reached up and took the hand. It twined around his wrist with the same unexpected strength as before, but the claws stayed clear of the metal. The being pulled him forward, and Shiro took a step towards it, up onto a ridge of rock and out of the foam that was all the raging surf could fling this far. Even as he took the step, the surf faded away. There was nothing but light-pricked darkness around him, and only the spiral path beneath his feet. Even the sea-being was gone, vanished from one second to the next.

He looked down at his arm to see the glowing starfish still there, its long tentacles wrapped around metal and flesh alike. It continued to shine for a long moment, brighter even than the spiral path beneath his feet. But Shiro took one step, and its glow dimmed until it too was gone.

Swallowing his regret at the loss, Shiro kept walking, onward and upward.


	5. twisted into knots

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this chapter, folks. Somehow it grew like 400 words in final edits. The last chapter might get pushed back into tomorrow, but I still plan to get the next one up tonight.

Pidge wasn't watching Lance the way that the other two were, Keith tense and restless, Hunk desperate and anxious, but she looked up anyway when he slumped down over his crossed legs with a sigh.

"We're good," he said, raising his hand in a V sign, and all three of the boys took a moment now to sag in relief.

Then they turned to look at Pidge.

***

Shiro's timesense was already askew, but it was only now that he realized that even his body didn't seem to be counting the steps. His hurts had vanished after every trial, the scrapes and strains and injuries fading away, and with them the exhaustion he had incurred. Here, on the path, no new tiredness dogged his steps as he walked. No shortness of breath, no growl in his stomach, not even the thick throat of thirst. He just went on, each step as easy as the last, and each as meaningless. Impatience dug at him, but he didn't know if it was deserved, if he'd really gone any longer or farther than he had before the last three trials.

And the impatience warred with reluctance. His steps didn't feel any heavier, but he noticed it only because he expected that they would. They should have been weighted down with weariness, Shiro thought, but the only thing that made them drag was guilt. He hadn't been able to look at Pidge back when he'd made his confession, but he could imagine the look on her face, the hurt and fury in her eyes.

The betrayal.

He'd loved them too, Shiro thought, as if arguing with her shadow. Commander Holt had been almost a father to him, Matt his closest friend. She wasn't the only one who wanted them back, and it wasn't only her hopes he'd risked destroying by keeping this knowledge to himself. But he'd had to do what was best for their mission.

It did no good. The shadow of Pidge, no more than his picture of her in his mind's eye, was still brilliant and savage and hurt enough to tear his protests apart.

Walking along the slow curve of the rising spiral, Shiro curled his left hand against his chest, like he could hold in the feeling that threatened to rise up and choke him, and plodded on.

***

"You may remain as you are," the Judge told Pidge, nodding to where she sat, half-turned away from the other paladins and the closest of their small Bachean audience. "Only settle your mind, and focus upon the deeds you have done, and the weight you would expect to take for them, and the companion who is bearing it for you."

"Maybe hum a little," Lance suggested, scooting closer. "That helped for me."

All three of them had moved in. Pidge could feel the tension thrumming between them, entirely different from the stiff tightness that had settled on her own shoulders this past several hours. They were guilty, upset, afraid for Shiro. The feeling that was cramping in her stomach was more bitter than that.

"Are you okay?" Hunk asked her.

"Give me some space," she snapped, and looked away from the worried creases of his frown. "I don't need you all sitting on top of me."

They retreated, Hunk anxious and hang-dog, Keith frowning but herding Lance back. Pidge looked up at the Judge standing just beyond the barrier, tilting her head back until her neck threatened to ache so that she could meet the huge, liquid eyes above the Bachean's long thick snout.

"Close your eyes, Green Paladin," she said. "Focus on your trial, as it comes."

***

From one step to the next, the world around Shiro changed. The impatience he'd been wrestling with vanished in a flare of satisfaction, leaving only the dull, leaden weight of dread in his chest. It was time for the last of his paladins' trials, and the one that mattered most. What he'd done had been as much a crime against her as against anyone else they had hurt.

Taking a deep, ragged breath, Shiro glanced around. His first thought was that he was standing in the mechanical accesses of a ship or on the unclad piping of a great factory. He stood on a dimly-lit catwalk, the star-spattered darkness falling away beneath him, no railing to either side. Long stretches of darker tubing ran thick along the walls to his left and right, crossing and curling together and winding around each other, though the curves and knots of them looked more organic and messy than a well-laid infrastructure should have been.

By now, Shiro knew to look about for another figure. An opponent, or supplicant, or guide, just as in the last three trials. But he couldn't see anyone, and after a moment he stepped forward, continuing along the catwalk. The only light came from the star-glimmers below and tiny chinks in the metal above, allowing pinpricks of light only faintly brighter, and his eyes were slowly adjusting to the dimness.

Within three paces there was a sound like wind in the distance, and the metal roof overhead groaned, deep and loud. And along with that groan of metal came a slower, woodier creaking noise, as of wood bending under the wind, or a tree pressed to its limits by a gale. The sound came from around him, not above.

That wasn't tubing tangling the walls. They were roots, or vines, or branches. Some kind of wood, no clearer color than 'dark' in the dimness, bristling with thorns. Shiro still couldn't see a waiting figure, but he could make out a voice, almost, in the far-away rush of wind and the moaning of moving wood. "My knot tightens, green paladin."

The feeling of a voice in the groaning was lost as, all around Shiro, the winding roots along the walls began to move. They pulled away slowly, with horrible small ripping sounds as tiny root-tendrils embedded into the joins of the metal tore themselves free. Shiro could see thorns bristling from the wood, long haphazard spikes that he'd taken for bits of broken metal or misplaced nails.

Freed from their metal-bound roots, the vines moved more easily, stretching towards the catwalk from either side. Overhead and below, they stretched out towards each other and started to wind together, their long tendrils curling to create a wicker-pattern tunnel around the narrow metal path. A tunnel that was closing in, slow but sure, thorns bristling inward.

Ahead of Shiro, the roots were pulling free from the walls as far as he could see, closing in along the length of the catwalk until it vanished into darkness. He risked a look back. There was the faintest outline back there, in the space behind him that hadn't earlier existed, of a great trunk rising up out of the vast darkness beneath the catwalk to dwarf its thin metal span, soaring on and on higher through dark, broken metal until it vanished far above.

Shiro ran. There was nothing else he could do but duck his head and sprint down the catwalk, hoping that in the dimness opening up ahead of him there would be a point where the twining wood came to an end. The tunnel of wood was continuing to weave itself around him, with a horrible cracking groan that filled his ears.

Ahead of him there was a junction where the catwalk branched off to the left, lit by the sputtering of a harsh fluorescent-toned glow far overhead. He peered through the closing branches, trying to see--there was no wicker-work of thorny vines closing in on the offshoot branch of the path. The weave ahead of him was closing tighter and tighter and tighter, though, thorns closing in to block off that route, and Shiro put on a burst of speed and flung himself through the closing gap. He felt pain blaze a line down his hip as he slid through, a thorn tearing through fabric and skin, but he managed to clear the gap and hit the catwalk, rolling back to his feet.

There was a sound to his left and right like Velcro ripping, and he didn't have to pause and look to know that the movement bulking along the walls was more of the wooden roots pulling free. The groaning noise started to rise in the air again as he bolted forward, boots ringing on the catwalk, and looked for another branching he could take. Ahead of him the vines were curling away from the walls, curving inward and reaching for each other, but he could see another junction in the distance.

He reached it before the vines closed in, just barely, and scooted under a crashing length of wood to find another stretch of tunnel where the walls only started to wake at his entrance. Half a race and half a maze, Shiro thought--the danger was ahead of him and behind, so he couldn't just outrun it, but if he could keep finding new avenues, new branches of the catwalk, then he could still stay ahead of it. He just had to a way out before any of the thorny tunnels had a chance to close around him completely.

There was another juncture, and another, and more thorns caught at him as he slid through narrower and narrower gaps in the closing thorn-walls that tried to block his escape. He had lost track of the turns he'd made, but he had the sick feeling that at some point he'd turned back towards the vast trunk that had to be the source of these vines, and might find himself sooner or later back on the first catwalk, completely encased now in wood and thorn.

***

Pidge could still feel the other paladins watching her, and it made her skin prickle. It had been easier for them. They'd been shocked, and guilty, and afraid for Shiro, and ready to embrace any kind of penance they could find and throw themselves heart and soul into helping Shiro redeem them. They hadn't contended with the bitterness still lurking in Pidge's stomach. She was angry--she was _furious_ at Shiro.

The Judge of Souls had talked about focusing on what they'd done as if Pidge could think about anything else, and about settling her mind as if there was any chance she could calm her racing thoughts. She'd known that her dad and Matt could be dead. She'd accepted that when she'd chosen to stay with Voltron, instead of going after them. But she hadn't known that she could have killed them.

Shiro could have told her. All those times when they'd talked together about their memories of her family, or her struggles with their loss, or Shiro's feelings about their mission, she thought that they'd been connecting. That he'd been treating her like an adult. And instead, the whole time, he'd been keeping this secret from her. It made her furious to know that he'd been willing to sacrifice them--though she should have known he would, Pidge thought bitterly, from that first prison break on that first Galra ship when he'd gone in planning to leave the prisoners on board. She was angrier, almost, that she hadn't figured it out on her own.

Because she should have known. She'd researched Galra prisoner records obsessively; she'd downloaded every scrap of information she could, searching for the place where her family might be held. She'd seen files with transfer records pages long, this ship to another ship to a holding facility to another ship and so on, on and on down page until the file cut off. She'd seen half-corrupted blueprints of Galra cruisers, each with slightly different layouts, each with holding cells. The information had been right there, and she'd brushed it off.

Shiro should have told her, but it was also her own fault that she hadn't known.

***

The next branching catwalk was as narrow as usual, a thin span of spindly metal with no railings and no visible supports, and Shiro had to grab at a smooth patch on a thick-boled vine and haul himself up over it, thorns scraping his shins, to tumble down onto it. As soon as he made it to his feet, though, he saw that ahead of him the catwalk widened abruptly, stretching out for meters on either side to touch the walls.

Though the only lights were dim in the distance, he could tell that the wide platform was already thick with the broad wooden vines, running in tangles along the floors and walls, arching overhead where they'd grown thick and strong, and all of them were bristling with thorns. Already their rootlets were tearing free of the floor, and the tangles overhead were bending downwards. Shiro glanced back just long enough to see that the vines he'd just passed through had crashed together to form a barrier, their broken thorns interlaced, blocking any possibility of retreat.

Turning back to the space ahead, noisy with the creaks and groans of twisting wood and stirring with dimly-seen movement, Shiro drew in a breath, ducked his head, and charged forward. It was clearer now than ever how this would have been so much easier for Pidge. Small and agile as she was, she could have dodged easily the swiping broadsides of thorned vines, leapt lightly over thick knots as they humped up underfoot, ducked the thick bole that tried to crash down on top of him. For his own part, Shiro stumbled at the glancing blow of the swipe, nearly hung himself up on a thick thorn when the knot rose up, and felt another stab into his shoulder and score a bloody line down his back as he avoided the crashing bole.

He had to win through, for Pidge's sake. Shiro tried to think of her, quick and clever and fierce, to bolster himself with memories of her as he had with the other three paladins. With each of them, it had been a memory that had helped him win through their ordeal. He'd felt a moment of closeness, almost like the sharing of thoughts that existed in the Voltron bond, and each time it had shown him how to survive the challenge and triumph in their trial.

But the memories that were coming to him now weren't inspiring. In his mind's eye he could see Pidge in the infirmary with the rescued prisoners, believing without question that he had mindlessly, violently, hurt Matt. He could remember the shutters that had gone up when the paladins first tried to join in their bond, shutting them all out to keep her secrets close, and the set of her jaw and her determined eyes when she'd told him that she was leaving to look for her family alone. They were the most important thing in the world, to her, and the reason she was here. Shiro had known that, and chosen, _because_ he'd known that, to hide the truth from her.

And the others, he reminded himself, but again the reminder fell flat. The conflict he'd meant to keep from them was a moral one; Pidge had a personal stake.

In the dim light, with the thorned roots and vines all around, Shiro couldn't even see where he should go. He'd thought when he first came in that there was a place beyond, at the far end, where the catwalk narrowed again and the tangle faded away, but now he'd lost track of that spot. And his thoughts were bringing only distraction, not clarity or focus.

More vines struck him, driving thorns into his flesh, and before he knew it Shiro had been driven up against one of the walls, caged in by moving lengths of wood and vine.

***

It felt like the first time they'd tried to form the Voltron bond--like there was a wall up between Pidge and everyone else, and she couldn't bring it down without spilling out everything behind it that she didn't want them to see. For all her anger, she told herself, she did want to reach Shiro. She was mad at him, but she didn't want him to die. Not for this, and not for her. But the wall was still there.

Her heart was pounding, and Pidge took a few deep breaths, trying to calm herself down. She was too aware of the other paladins' eyes on her, the Bacheans standing just beyond the forcefield, the hard stone under her butt and the sun beating down a little too bright overhead. This was going to take focus, and calm, and Pidge could let her feelings get her going, but she couldn't let them get in her way. She'd found a way around every other obstacle she'd ever encountered, sooner or later; she could work around herself, too.

When he'd decided to keep quiet, Shiro had known what information she had gotten from the Galra, and what she was doing with it. He'd known she had the puzzle pieces, and he'd also guessed, correctly, that she wouldn't put them together on her own. And Shiro knew she wasn't stupid. So... it wasn't because she'd been an idiot, then. It was because she hadn't _wanted_ to know.

But if she didn't know, she couldn't do anything about it. Pidge swallowed, took another deep breath, and let it out. If she actually wanted to help anyone, she had to deal with the truth, not shove it away. She was a genius, and there might be solutions on hand if she actually looked at the situation, instead of just shying away from the pain of it.

Some of the bitter tightness in her gut eased away, and she sighed and reached out again for Shiro, pushing through the crumbling wall between them.

***

Shiro couldn't hear anything right now but the groaning and creaking of wood as the thorns closed in. He pressed himself harder against the wall, panting, and felt a cold sheen of sweat break out across his face and shoulders as he realized his situation. It would have been bad enough if he was the only one in mortal peril here. But this was Pidge's trial, and he couldn't let her fail and die.

And he doubly couldn't bear the thought of letting her die in shock and pain, hating him for what had just been revealed. Selfishly, he wanted her to have time to come to terms with what he'd led to them to do. Maybe even time to figure out a better way, now that she knew; she was clever, as quick and adaptive as she was logical. She more than any of the others had tempted him to tell, to confess, in the hope that she could open up his options--but the emotional toll, and the risk to their bond, had been too much for him to dare.

Well, she knew now. And as little as Shiro wanted to go back and face her, he had to keep them both alive through her ordeal. Standing here sick with guilt didn't help either of them.

He flung himself sideways as a vine twisted towards him, and thorns grated against the metal wall he'd had his back against just a moment before. Things were shifting in Shiro's head, his guilt giving way just enough to allow other memories to come through. Better memories: talking together with Pidge, discussing tactics, looking at star maps. Pidge wasn't nearly well-trained enough to be a tactician, not yet, but she was intelligent and she had a talent, already half-honed, for infiltration.

_"There's always a gap,"_ she'd told him once, looking at a chart of Galra-occupied territory and tracing the patrols. _"No one can guard every approach. Sometimes it means disguising yourself, or taking a route no one thinks needs to be guarded."_ She'd smirked sideways at him. _"Find out what approaches they're ready for, and then do something different."_

The words rang in his ears so clearly he almost expected to see Pidge there beside him, speaking aloud. And as soon as they came to mind, Shiro looked sideways and saw it--a small gap in the metal floor a few feet away, a shaft leading down into the darkness. He moved, dodging another curling vine, and leapt for it, diving through into the empty air beneath the catwalks.

There was a ladder beside him, stretching down until it vanished in the nothingness, and after several seconds of free-fall Shiro was able to grab at it with his metal arm. He jerked painfully to a stop, his shoulder howling like his arm was about to tear free from its mooring, and looked up. Overhead he could just see the dim bulk of vines reaching down, twining around the rungs, but they were slow, and ponderous, and he could see the moment when they had no more stretch to them and jerked to a halt, one by one, far above. There were no more walls around him, or vines, or anything else. Just darkness, and far below, the pinpricks of light that peppered it.

And he could hear the roar of wind and the creaking of wood, far above, and words forming within it. "You have passed your trial, green paladin."

The wind and the wood fell silent. One moment Shiro was clutching metal in each hand, and the next it was gone, and the rung beneath his feet as well. He'd been expecting it, but he still had to stretch out a hand to catch himself; his fingers touched the gleaming surface of the spiral path.


	6. face-to-face

The path before him still seemed infinite, the gleaming, curved plane of the spiral rising up through the glittering darkness, higher and higher, until it passed beyond Shiro's sight. For the first time since he'd started up it, Shiro looked down. The spiral seemed to fall away forever behind him, as well, the milk-pale floor long vanished into the black.

He felt his stomach lurch and turned his gaze upward again, starting forward with a firm step. One last ordeal, one last trial: his own trial, before his own dead. Shiro had more of those than he thought the paladins realized, yet. Surviving the arena, enduring the Druids, escaping the Galra prisons--those had each come with a body count. Not all of those whose deaths he'd caused had deserved their fate, or accepted it willingly.

After the last long treks up the spiral path, Shiro was ready for another length of uncountable steps, another relentless march that never made him weary. But while he couldn't count his steps, or the seconds between them, it still felt far too soon when he lurched to a stop, startled by the faint glow suddenly filling the space around him.

It was a small space, walls of tarnished silver rising in a dome overhead, decorated with silvery drapes of some kind of sleek fabric and various shabby items of furniture. A bed or seating area, Shiro guessed, seeing the round well of cushions, and a more prosaic table, low to the ground, with cushioned couches instead of chairs. And to one side, a large frame, with a webwork of thin silver threads strung from the curving sides. It took him a moment to recognize it as a loom.

There was a Bachean there, sitting before it on another of the oddly-shaped couches. From the way its patchy fur had gone dull and grey, and the wrinkled flesh beneath it sagged on its bones, Shiro guessed that the alien was very old. Its horns were ground-down stubs, so Shiro, with his inexperienced eye, couldn't even guess whether it was female and male.

But the way that the horns had been filed down, rough and careless, drew his eye back towards them. That scar down the alien's neck that looked like the leaving of a Galra prong-whip, the familiar symbols tattooed into the back of its hands--Shiro was looking at a Galran prisoner. A mining slave, maybe, or a political prisoner, since they'd marked both hands. Shiro looked into those cataract-clouded eyes and realized that he must be, very literally, before the dead.

"I'm sorry," he said, through a tight throat. He felt like there was a band around his chest, cutting off his breath, and those were all the words he could manage.

The Bachean didn't seem to hear. "Help to unwind this tangle, black paladin," it said to him, gesturing to one side.

When Shiro looked that way, he could see a basket there, sitting by a small squat cylinder that, when he approached it, radiated a gentle warmth. He didn't know how he'd missed it on his first glance around, because the basket was full of thread, tangled-together strands of every shade of the rainbow, a blaze of color that seized the eye and dragged it in. Crouching by the basket, he reached down towards it, then hesitated with his hand just short of the knotted skeins.

He looked back at the Bachean, confusion pushing back the crushing weight on his lungs. "I thought this was an ordeal."

The Bachean chuckled, a wheezy, gentle sound. "You haven't started the task yet. Feed the ends to me as you free them. Every color you find, for they are all needed for the work." Its hand was still outstretched towards the basket.

Shiro reached down again, probing for an end to one of the strings. The Bachean's words hadn't seemed like a forewarning, but they had put him just enough on his guard that he was able to bite his reaction down to a hiss.

The strings _hummed_ when he touched them, vibrating with sensation, and each of those sensations struck in a different way. This one was burning hot where his finger skimmed it, that one bone-achingly cold; one pricked at him as if thorned, and another sent a jolt of static up through his arm. He'd used his right hand, so he shouldn't have felt it as pain, only sensor feedback, but it hurt all the same.

He jerked his hand away, and his breath caught in his throat when he looked down at it and saw flesh. Both hands were skin and muscle and bone, his left hand and the one he'd lost. When he turned his arm he felt muscle flex, but his brain tried to tell him about servos shifting, nerves that had been re-trained to speak to wires unable to fall back into their old habits. His hands were bare, his gloves missing and his jacket stripped away, and he felt uncomfortably exposed in his bare flesh and shirt-sleeves.

When he'd started out, he'd been in armor, hadn't he? It was hard to recall, the memory sliding away as he sought for it.

Shiro looked up to see the Bachean waiting, hand still outstretched, looking at him with a curious calm. Kind, patient, and implacable. There were no such clear consequences for failing or refusing this task as there had been for all the others, but Shiro had no question that this was his ordeal. He looked at the Bachean a moment more, a calm and quiet ghost, then set his jaw and turned back to his basket.

The burning thread, first, the same brilliant red as Keith's lion; it had a loose loop off to the edge, and he tugged at it until something in the mass of threads gave, and the end pulled out. He passed it to the Bachean, who drew it through its fingers, and Shiro had to dig at the nest of threads to keep it from stopping up in a knot as the loom began to hum and the string drew taut. The other threads wrapped round his fingers, sharp and cold, jolting and slicing, each brilliant color a different kind of pain.

He had to dig in with both hands to keep the burning thread free from further knotting, and as it was drawn out by the working of the loom, the tangle shifted and churned, and Shiro saw another end surface, dandelion-bright. He grabbed at it, felt a jolt up his arm, and nearly dropped it. But out of his corner of the eye he could see the Bachean reaching out for this one, and he pulled enough of the orange string out to hand its end over as well.

Again the string drew taut and the tangle in the basket had to be pulled back and apart. This time Shiro tried to anticipate, searching for another thread-end, gritting his teeth against the pain as he shifted handfuls of string. His hands were starting to show marks, red lines of pain where the burning thread had seared them, white cuts with blood welling in the bottom where the third end, vibrant amethyst, seemed to cut. The wounds were as clear on his right hand as on his left, beading with blood that smeared his skin but couldn't seem to stain the humming threads..

Another end surfaced, gleaming turquoise, and he caught at it, expecting it to hurt as well. Instead it was soft against his hand, soothing and comfortable as if he'd grasped a thread of cloud. He sat back on his heels in shock, then drew it out gladly, handing it over to the weaver at his side.

He didn't have time to reflect on it long; without his tugging the tangle was starting to draw tight again, threatening to knot, and the Bachean weaver had reached out again for this thread. Handing it over, Shiro returned to his task, tugging at bright loops of string until they parted and let all three threads pass through them unimpeded. Again and again he drew out the ends of the threads, deathly chill and pleasantly cool, prickling like thorns and humming with a teeth-grinding buzz, and handed them to the Bachean. His hands burned every time he reached into the basket, the pain renewing each time like hot water on a scald. Behind him, the loom hummed on.

He snatched out end after end, undid loop after loop, until suddenly there was no more left to tangle, just the tame ends of skeins, each coiled to itself in the bottom of the basket, running out as their far ends whisked one by one up into the Bachean's busily-working hands. Shiro jerked his own hands back as the last few threads whisked past, lashing like whips.

Straightening up, he rubbed his hands together, clutching each with the other in the vain hope that wringing them together would ease the the burn. Then he realized that the hum of the loom had stopped, and turned to look.

It framed a brilliant, shifting tapestry. The slender webwork had turned to a thick circle of fabric, covered with colorful patterns and many abstract, ornate scenes. Some of them seemed familiar, rounded leonine heads and dashes of primary color, but Shiro couldn't seem to focus his eye upon any one scene for long enough to truly take it in. The whole work shivered with some kind of power, the humming energy of the strings joined together into a neatly-woven whole.

Looking up at him, the Bachean reached out and took his hands in its own. They were gnarled, rough and scarred, but their careful touch quieted the burn in Shiro's flesh. His throat loosened when he met the Bachean's rheumy eyes again.

"I'm sorry that you died, whether or not it was something we did that killed you. And I'm sorry we didn't do more to help you. I think the other paladins might have something to say about that, and I promise I'll listen to them. But whenever this happened, I didn't think we could save you and survive, and there's a whole galaxy out there that we have to be alive to free."

"Yes," the Bachean said. "You took up both what was harsh and what was soft, and look how strong and vibrant the weave has become for it. Every thread is necessary for the pattern to be expressed in full." Just as Shiro was trying to decide if the Bachean had actually understood his words, it released his hands and took a step back. "You have passed your trial, black paladin."

Between one breath and the next, the Bachean and its home had both faded away, and the loom with it. But not the tapestry. For a moment Shiro seemed to hang in the star-spattered darkness before it, the solid surface of the spiral path nowhere to be found. Then the tapestry hazed away into a flare of color, a rainbow glowing in the darkness, and Shiro fell, catching futilely at the emptiness all about him for purchase.

He struck the milky floor of the Judge's hall hard, all the breath knocked out of him. Instinctively he pushed himself up with one elbow, rolling over to lie on his back, instead of his front, as he gasped for air. In the mirrored interior of the dome, above him and all around, he could see himself, his face reflected back at every angle. His helmet had fallen free, but he was armored again, and when he flexed his arm he heard the familiar hum of machinery at work.

As he was catching his breath, the door irised open, and he pushed himself back onto his feet to greet the Judge. She smiled at him, her hands folded in front of her. "Your fellow paladins will be eager to see you, paladin of the Black Lion."


	7. with fresh eyes

"Paladins of Voltron," the Judge said, standing in front of the forcefield and projecting her voice to be heard by all the Bacheans who had gathered around them again in the green courtyard where they'd landed. Shiro stood by her shoulder and watched her reach out to touch a recessed switch on a piece of vine-twined statuary. "Our dead have judged your cause just, and their deaths worthy in its pursuit. The stain of their blood has been lifted from Voltron's brow, and will not shadow it again."

As soon as she pressed the switch, the forcefield was gone. Shiro stepped around her, and Lance slammed into him with a full-body hug.

"Shiro! You're okay!"

Shiro patted his shoulder, gave him a moment of clinging, and then gently pushed him back. "I'm fine."

"Of course he is," Keith said, giving Shiro a nod.

Hunk smiled at him, bright and relieved, and then his face furrowed back into a frown. "You shouldn't have done that," he said. "If you'd ended up hurt because of us, that would have been way too much to handle."

His shoulders had slumped as he said it, but at the end he straightened them, looking at Shiro like he was ready to stare him down. Shiro met his eyes; Hunk had a point, even if Shiro wanted to flinch away from it, and he deserved to have it acknowledged.

"Hunk's right. It would have been on us if anything had happened to you," Lance said, flinging an arm over Hunk's shoulder. "What would we have done then, huh? We would've been all alone here on Judgy Cow Planet. Uh, no offense."

The Judge nodded gravely. "But you did take responsibility, paladins, even if you did not go through your trials yourselves. Your hearts were with him as he went forth and faced your ordeals. The ties between your spirits run true and deep."

"Yeah, uh, that's kind of a Voltron thing," Hunk said. He'd relaxed somewhere between Shiro's acknowledgement and Lance's touch, and now he smiled sheepishly at the Judge of Souls.

She opened her mouth, closed it again, looked at him in a moment in what Shiro wasn't sure was confusion or enlightenment, and then went on. "All the same, your trials are done, and I am glad you have passed them. I have brought many before the dead who have said that their causes were just, or our people's deaths deserved, and never before has that been proven true. I am glad to meet those whom the dead have judged worthy at last."

"Uh, how many people have you done this to?" Lance asked.

"Sometimes I have caught Galra, or their sycophants, in traps that those who seek them would not suspect. And sometimes they come to us, full of arrogance. On First Bachara, the Galra governor herself once applied to the Judge of Souls, she was so sure that our deaths under her rule were proper and just." There was something wistful in her voice, as if she was speaking of a treasured memory. "The Empire does not waste its time avenging those who die in willing practice of local superstition."

"Wow," Keith said. "That was dumb."

She made a full-body motion that Shiro suspected was supposed to be a shrug. "She believed her mission was important. So do you, paladins of Voltron. The difference is that you have won past our dead in its name. Even noble causes may lead to the shedding of blood. To be pardoned of it requires that you pass two tests: that you regret your losses, and that you have enough chance of success to make them worthwhile. That you have passed gives me hope, for you and for us."

Looking from one paladin to another, she lingered for a moment on each of their faces. She started with Shiro, and he followed her gaze. When she looked, last, at Pidge, he swallowed down the urge this time to look away. Being evasive wouldn't fix anything. He had to confront whatever might have sprung up between them; he'd sowed the seeds of it, after all.

Pidge was standing a bit away from the rest of them, her back stiff. She met the Bachean's eyes without hesitation, chin up like a challenge. Then she looked away, as if she'd read something there, and looked straight at Shiro. The look she gave him was fierce, and he could tell she was angry, but he found himself relieved by the sight. She was hurt, and she was mad, but she was letting him see--she hadn't shut him out and closed herself off. Something in him loosened, just a little.

"Now that your trials are complete, I can offer you the hospitality of my domain," the Judge of Souls said, drawing everyone's attention back to her. "You must need rest, and refreshment. And I have the means at hand to hide your lions, in case the Galra come looking. You will be safe here."

"Thank you," Shiro told her. "We'll take you up on that."

She beckoned to them and started away from the forcefield circle. The crowd of Bacheans around the courtyard parted as they walked through it, following the Judge to one of the long halls deep in the complex. The other paladins fell in around Shiro, and Keith edged closer until they were nearly bumping shoulders.

"They're right," he said. "You shouldn't have taken all our trials on alone. We're responsible for what we do, whether we know about it or not."

"I think you should have told us," Hunk said, his shoulders hunching. "It's not our fault that we didn't know, but you should have let us think about it, too."

Keith nodded. "You don't have to make all these decisions alone."

"Yeah," Lance put in. "Don't hog all the guilt. I need more excuses to lie around and feel sorry for myself when you're trying to get us to do training exercises."

Shiro found himself chuckling harder than the weak joke deserved, but he sobered quickly as he considered their words. They had a point. It wasn't fair to keep them in the dark. Their actions had consequences, and he couldn't get rid of those consequences just by trying to take on all of the responsibility for them. It didn't work like that. This encounter had proven that well enough.

He considered Hunk's hunched shoulders and sad eyes, and the stiffness in Keith's movements, and the horrified distress that Lance was doing his best to hide behind a joke. Pidge's jaw had a grim set to it, and he could tell that they were far from finished on this issue. This was what he'd wanted to avoid: seeing them face the ugliness that they were all still trying to swallow down.

But the dose had been delivered, and if they survived it, maybe they'd be stronger for it.

"You're right," he said at last. "I'm sorry. It's my job as your leader to make those calls, but I should have talked them out with you and gotten your input. We're meant to be a team."

"I feel better about keeping my secrets now," Pidge muttered behind him, and despite the caustic edge to the words, Shiro felt his tension ease a little further now that she'd finally spoken up. "Seriously, if you want us to be your team, you have to be part of it too. None of us are supposed to hide things. You don't get a free pass."

That was fair. "You're right," Shiro said. "I'll try to do better from now on."

"We're all gonna do better," Lance said, his undauntable enthusiasm bubbling back up to encompass them all. "If we put our heads together, we can figure something out. I mean, we _are_ the paladins of Voltron."

The others greeted that with mutters of affirmation. Looking around at them, Shiro felt the last of the tension slip from his shoulders. These were his teammate: clever, brave, determined, and compassionate. He'd been trying to carry this for them, but in reality, they were equal to the load. He just had to let them carry it together.

"Right," he said. "We are."


End file.
